The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form , by Rachel Murray
2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/0041462x-10237821
ISSN2325-8101
Autores Tópico(s)Geographies of human-animal interactions
ResumoRachel Murray’s The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form provides a valuable contribution to modernist studies because Murray explains how the field of entomology, which rose in popularity as a result of the First World War, informed modernist aesthetics. The study illustrates the benefits of greening modernism, a recent turn that has moved scholars from studying the city and human psyche in modernist texts to focusing on the intersection of modernism and the natural world. However, Murray’s accessible and fascinating study makes it clear that such a move does not ignore human subjects. Instead, it reveals the complex entanglement of humans with the environment. Murray concentrates on Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H.D., and Samuel Beckett, all of whose experimental work helped to define high Anglo-modernism. She claims that “the figure of the exoskeleton (or outer shell) can shed new light on modernism’s linguistic and formal innovations, its engagement with key psychological and socio-political concerns, as well as its questioning of the limits of the human” (3). According to Murray, modernists responded to war, urban modernity, and industrial capitalism by turning to the insect to better understand how humans changed in response to new conditions. Modernists, she claims, began to see humans becoming more and more buglike as they were transformed on the battlefield. In making such an argument, she deftly positions the figure of the insect as integral to understanding not only modernist aesthetics but also the history of modernism in relation to war.Because of the popularity of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), and because it has received so much critical attention, it would seem that very little was left to be said about the insect figure in literature. However, Kafka was only one writer in a long line who employed this figure to suggest “the powerlessness of the modern subject amid an increasingly dehumanising social reality” (5). With the destruction of the First World War, that social reality became far more pronounced; the insect figure moved beyond the realm of metaphor into reality, “as soldiers were strapped into bug-like gas masks and disguised beneath camouflage uniforms” and as they “crawled through the mud in armoured tanks and lived in holes in the ground.” Murray also explains that the First World War saw entomologists united with the chemical industry to destroy perceived natural foes (6). One only has to read the soldier-poets to understand why such a partnership seemed necessary. In Isaac Rosenberg’s “Louse Hunting” (1922), for example, soldiers hunt for vermin to the point of madness:For a shirt verminously busyYon soldier tore from his throat,With oathsGodhead might shrink at, but not the lice,And soon the shirt was aflareOver the candle he’d lit while we lay. (2006)It is this historical context that informs Murray’s The Modernist Exoskeleton, and she successfully uses it to transform our theories about how the war informed modernism. While the insect figure appeared in prewar modernist writing, the First World War deepened authors’ interest in it, and the insect’s powerful exoskeletal armor became a form of literary protection against the physical and psychological effects of modern warfare. This resulted in a new form of creative energy.One of the most interesting connections that Murray makes between entomology and modernism is the influence French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre had on key modernist writers. Fabre gained a following in the years during and immediately after the First World War. He published articles in the English Review from 1912 to 1922 in the very same pages where modernist texts appeared. Murray describes one particular article, “The Scavengers,” from 1917, in which Fabre writes about the dung beetle: “Out of the filth she creates the flower” (quoted in Murray 9). She argues that the modernist texts she examines in her chapters are also “born out of processes of decay” (9). The authors in her study used the destruction of wars to fuel their creativity. While some may believe modernist experimentation resulted in texts that lacked structure, her claim shows us that structure, influenced by the exoskeleton, informed modernist creativity.Murray’s introductory chapter touches on a number of significant modernist writers, such as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, who all, according to her definition of modernism, responded to the modern subject’s anxiety, which resulted from industrialization and war, by turning to insects for understanding. She narrows her focus to Lewis, Lawrence, H.D., and Beckett, however, because they “discovered not only a world of formal possibilities, but also a welcome limitation, in the figure of the exoskeleton. . . . Lewis’s surface modifications, Lawrence’s aesthetic exuviations, H.D.’s pupal provisionality and Beckett’s vermicular spasms all resemble a continual struggle to maintain the liveliness of the literary text in order to prevent it from hardening into a fixed and final form” (13). The insect form parallels the experimental writing of high modernism. Murray reminds us that the original Latin meaning of the word, insectum, is defined as having a divided body. However, she finds a broader definition even more fitting for her purposes: “In common parlance, an insect can be almost any small thing that creeps, flutters or crawls, and this study adopts the term in this broader, catchall sense to accommodate the diverse array of critters that populate the modernist universe” (11–12). The exoskeleton, that rigid external covering that provides support and protection in some invertebrates, helped modernist writers demonstrate that order could come from chaos.Murray opens her chapter on Lewis by describing the differences between a murex shell and a whelk shell, and this allows her to provide a lucid analysis of Lewis’s texts. The murex developed sharp spikes as a defense mechanism because it was so much more fragile than other shells, like the whelk (24). Inspired by “the survival strategies of insects” (26), Lewis, like the murex, transformed his writing again and again in an effort to confront “perceived dangers.” Murray writes, “Throughout his post-war writing, Lewis is engaged in a struggle to protect his art from destructive forces, and like the shell of [a] beetle the outer surface of his writing is continually shifting, transforming and revealing concealed parts of itself in a movement that is as disturbing as it is beguiling” (27). Having served in the Royal Artillery on the western front, it is no surprise that he felt the need for defense. Using his 1916 story “The French Poodle,” Murray illustrates the connection between “enshellment” and war. “From the outset of the text, Lewis establishes an atmosphere of excessive natural fecundity that cannot help but summon images of the ruptured bodies of nearby soldiers torn apart by exploding shells” (29). In contrast, in his 1937 war memoir, Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis writes, “This [dugout] was a shell that would take some cracking. I was in it when it was hit. It was as firm as a rock. It was a pleasure to be shelled in it” (quoted in Murray, 30). Murray says that these two quotations show that the insect shell in his war writing represents both “self-protection” and “a form of explosive energy” (31).The high point of the Lewis chapter comes with Murray’s explanation of how the dazzling camouflage used by some insects, like the tiger moth, informed his aesthetics. As evidence, she cites Tar (1996), first published in 1916, and his “Tyros and Portraits” paintings from the 1921 Leicester Galleries show. Lewis, according to Murray, would have been familiar with dazzling camouflage, since it had been used during the war; for example, the HMS Underwing submarine used the insect pattern to avoid detection. She says that “Lewis’s attempts to confound the gaze of the onlooker are evident” (32) in Tar, and confounding the gaze became a key aesthetic principle of Vorticism. She argues that in the years after the First World War, Lewis “continue[d] to deploy aesthetic strategies inspired by the ‘disruptive patterns’ of invertebrates, utilising various forms of insect mimicry” (33). Murray explains further that Vladimir Nabokov, who in addition to his literary reputation was also a respected lepidopterist, describes insect mimicry as a form of creative expression, reasoning that Darwin’s theory of natural selection fails to explain the presence of a “protective device carried to the point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance and luxury.” For Fabre and Nabokov, the surplus of activity involved in insect mimicry causes it to resemble an act of making rather than mere copying (40).This making is precisely how Lewis’s texts function. It was also the means by which he challenged what he believed to be a “new orthodoxy” of modernism. Modernist aesthetics in Pound, Eliot, Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce had become too homogenous for Lewis; he viewed their texts as “a fundamental threat to [modernism’s] artistic experimentation” (39). His works of this period, such as The Childermass (1928), satirize these other writers.One fellow modernist who reacted to Lewis’s criticism was Joyce, whose 1928 story “The Ondt and the Gracehoper” is a response to Lewis’s attacks. The story masks Joyce’s criticism of Lewis in the tale of the two insects and “seeks to expose the limitations of Lewis’s oppositional mentality” (44). Lewis’s criticism of modernism, as well as his flirtation with fascism “may have begun to compromise the author’s efforts to protect his writing against other, more substantial threats to artistic expression” (47). She argues that his “politics, like his aesthetics, are essentially reactive in nature, deriving much of their explosive energy from a sense of being under attack from all sides and needing to respond urgently and forcefully to these threats from without,” and that he “demonstrates an important shift in his strategy of offensive mimicry” (49). In his later work from the 1930s onwards, “self-mimesis” (53) where “the organism ensures its survival by simulating death or injury,” becomes the focus, a response to the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. His book Hitler (1931) blackballed him from publishers and his satirical work left him vulnerable to libel suits. Out of these artistic low points, however, self-mimesis emerged as an artistic strategy, and his creativity flourished through the creation of new and interesting characters like Snooty from Snooty Baronet (1983). Murray says that “Lewis’s resemblance to Snooty enables him to simultaneously exaggerate and mask his by now maladapted public image” (53).Murray begins her chapter on Lawrence with an exploration of “The Mosquito” (1923), a poem that has typically been read as being about a fear of contamination by “otherness”; however, she argues that the insect came to also represent for Lawrence an affirmation of life. She says that his “use of entomological figures is central to his vision of the literary text as a lively and disruptive force capable of stinging characters and readers alike into a new awareness of themselves and the world around them” (64). Murray’s own use of vivid language here, and throughout the text, is engaging. She uses ecdysis, the moulting of the exoskeleton that occurs in many invertebrates, as a creative lens to examine Lawrence’s texts. In her reading of Sons and Lovers (1913) and The Rainbow (1915), Murray argues that the characters’ casting off of their identities helps to structure the novels, but this goes beyond the characters. She writes that he “saw the outbreak of the First World War as an opportunity for writers and readers alike . . . to ‘break the shell, the form’ constraining the modern subject and its forms of expression and ‘creep forth’ from this abandoned husk, ‘tender and overvulnerable, but alive’” (67). He desired readers to engage with his novels in the same way he believed insects should be studied—in their natural environments.For Lawrence, the novel provides an ideal space in which to “know” a creature—whether human or nonhuman—in its life-world: it is “only in the novel,” he posits, that “all things” are given free play. “If you try and nail anything down in the novel,” he adds, “either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks off with the nail” (quoted in Murray, 66). These remarks present an image of the text as a kind of insect but, crucially, one that refuses to be pinned down by the taxonomic methods of nineteenth-century entomology (66). Like Lewis, then, Lawrence saw the First World War as offering an alternative to the shell of society and an opportunity for more creativity.As in her section on Lewis’s interwar writing, Murray uses the historical context of the rise of totalitarianism to examine Lawrence’s later work. Swarms, both insect and human varieties, feature in these texts. Murray’s focus on close readings and analysis of Kangaroo (1923) and Aaron’s Rod (1922) support well her claim that “the modernist language of the swarm conjures an image of textual unruliness in which words jostle on the page” (80). Such language is also “an attempt to maintain the liveliness of the literary text,” a point that further develops her main claim that Lawrence’s creativity emerged out of devastation. The chapter ends with an examination of perhaps Lawrence’s most famous text, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). In her reading, the novel, like previous Lawrence texts, shows the protagonist, Constance, casting off her identity as a sexless wife in the service of self-renewal, just as an insect that grows too large for its exoskeleton sheds its shell. Attacked for its supposed lack of morality, the novel reimagines “the boundaries of individual identity” and redefines “what it means to have a self in an age of collectivity” (91).Identity is highlighted again as the cocoon becomes the dominant image in Murray’s chapter on H.D.’s war writing, which details H.D.’s traumatic personal experiences, namely her 1915 pregnancy that ended with a stillbirth as well as the death of her brother in the war, her father’s death soon after, and the end of her marriage to Richard Aldington. For H.D., who believed her miscarriage was a result of hearing the news of the Lusitania sinking, war merged with the personal. She protected herself through writing and continually remade herself in the act of writing each new text. Murray explains that “the cocoon can serve to illuminate the author’s efforts to maintain the text in a ‘fluid, inchoate’ state, dissolving past experiences in order to rearticulate them anew and ensuring that the self is preserved by its disintegration, remade by what it makes” (98). These efforts are evident, she says, in H.D.’s fascination with insects, particularly her admiration for popular nature films. In her essay “The Mask and the Movietone” (1927), Murray writes that H.D. “likens the scientific projections of moths and hornets to the aggressive realism of the talkie,” and that H.D. (1998: 101) argues, “We are used to nature, expanded and ennobled past all recognition, now we must again readjust and learn to accept calmly, man magnified.” Such a resistance toward representational reality showcases the ways in which the figure of the insect influenced and inspired H.D.’s experimental writing.Murray argues that H.D.’s hallucination of insects on a wall in Corfu, where she went to heal from the war’s trauma, demonstrates “the various threads of connection in [her] writing between images of half-finished insects, the aesthetic imperfections of early cinema, and the shadowy workings of the psyche” (103). Freud, with whom H.D. frequently underwent talk-therapy, believed the hallucination to be “a sort of unclassified ‘delirium’” (H.D. 2002: 115). Murray, however, siding with the author in her disagreement with her doctor, sees the hallucination as “inspiration” (104), saying that “it becomes possible to develop a more multi-layered understanding of trauma in the author’s war fiction as a sign of psychic impairment that is also a form of creative stimulus.” Murray helps us to see more clearly how this personal event fueled her creative output. As she points out, the character Raymonde in the novel Palimpsest (1926) must live with her traumatic experiences, but those experiences, and the emotions that come with them, allow the character to move from poetry writing to fiction writing, a creative move H.D. made herself, born out of her own traumatic experiences. In H.D.’s Second World War poem The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), written during the Blitz, a caterpillar speaks of its ability to escape spiders and birds and argues that it “profit[s] / by every calamity” (1998: 12). This theme persists in H.D.’s later writing. Her novel Bid Me to Live: A Madrigal, written in 1949 but not published until 1960, illustrates, according to Murray, H.D.’s belief that her work could prepare its readers for the potential return of war, particularly nuclear destruction. The text refers back to scenes and experiences described in previous texts; thus, Murray argues, it “registers the birth of a more constructive force during this period” (123).The chapter on Samuel Beckett begins with Beckett’s post–Second World War writing, which responds to the rubble of massive loss and ruin of that war. Murray argues that he believed these horrors brought opportunity for a reimagining of what it meant to be human. C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski (2004) have termed Beckett’s postwar writing period as his “larval stage” (quoted in Murray, 131). Murray expands on their thinking by arguing that this period is where “the human is ‘thought again’ in Beckett’s writing” (131). The word “larval” first appears in Beckett’s Murphy (1938). Influenced by his reading of Darwin, Beckett uses larvae “to evoke instances where thoughts have been held up or hampered in their development,” using the character Belacqua from Echo’s Bones (written in 1933, published in 2014), as support: “Belacqua asserts that his memory has gone to hell and ‘if you can’t give me a better cue I’ll have to be like the embarrassed caterpillar and go back to my origins’” (quoted in Murray, 137).Beckett’s postwar writing focuses on subjects who are transformed into “crawling creatures” (13). His trilogy of post–Second World War novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (1951–1955) represents a “backward trajectory from vertebrate to invertebrate, as Molloy transforms from human to worm over the three novels” (142). “Beckett’s mutual fascination with moments of evolutionary deviation,” Murray writes, “is suggested by his marking out of a subsection of Darwin’s Origin entitled ‘Rudimentary, Atrophied, and Aborted Organs,’ which details a series of anomalous life forms that have somehow thwarted the usual stages of growth” (142). Through such representation, Beckett privileges instinct over human intelligence, and uses language to provide a new form of human expression born out of extreme situations such as those from the Second World War, which indicates that Beckett, like Lewis, Lawrence, and H.D., saw trauma as offering creative opportunity. Murray explains that Beckett differs in that “the author’s post-war prose suggests that the breakdown of language as a coherent system is not only inevitable, but that it may also present an opportunity for words to ‘combine otherwise and appear in new forms’” (141).This creative development led to his last experiment with the novel form, How It Is (1961), and in the last section of the chapter Murray focuses her attention on it. In a 1960 letter to BBC Radio’s Donald McWhinnie, Beckett said the novel, divided into three parts, centers on a “‘man’ lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his ‘life’ as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him” (quoted in Knowlson 1996: 461–62). How It Is, Murray argues, has “larval aspirations” because of the composition process, with Beckett “chopping sentences and paragraphs into unpunctuated segments,” which “forestalls the threat of closure,” as if the text is in “the caterpillar phase of composition” (157–58). Despite his characters’ larval stages, Murray says, “Beckett’s writing demonstrates a shared emphasis on creative forms of survival inspired by entomological life forms” (162).The Modernist Exoskeleton contains fascinating insights into the connections between entomology and modernist texts. The historical contexts of war are used astutely so that the reader rethinks how war informs literature, and modernist texts in particular. In all, her book opens up the genre of war literature. By specifically examining the insect figure, she also effectively greens modernism while exploring how the insect enabled modernists to understand the human subject under duress. One of Murray’s most valuable contributions for literary scholarship is the clear positioning of the insect in modernist aesthetics. The modernist use of the animal has been written about extensively, but what of the smallest creature we share our world with? In comparison to the animal, little has been said of the insect, despite, as Murray makes clear, the modernist preoccupation with them. Her scholarship should hopefully propel even more critical insights on these vital creatures.
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